The New York Times further fans the flames of the emerging uneasiness between Microsoft and its hardware partners. As the paper reports, Microsoft decided it needed to get into the hardware game (with Surface) after the utter failure of HP's Slate 500 Windows 7 tablet. "Microsoft worked with other hardware partners to devise products that would be competitive with the iPad, but it ran into disagreements over designs and prices. 'Faith had been lost' at Microsoft in its hardware partners, including by Steven Sinofsky, the powerful president of Microsoft's Windows division, according to [a] former Microsoft executive." The biggest news is not Surface itself. It's the changing industry it represents. Microsoft failed to deliver capable smartphone/tablet software, which pissed off OEMs, who, in turn, turned to Android (and webOS for HP) - which in turn pissed off Microsoft, leading to Surface. Had Microsoft gotten its act together sooner, we'd have had far better OEM products.

Yeah, and it was almost abusive - at the end, pushing those already long-obsolete 8bit machines (not only Commodore) into places which, well, just didn't have much of any other choice. Powerful and quite inexpensive (if you wanted, if you settled for slightly older but still powerful) hardware - coming from the economies of scale, standardisation, and constant upgrade cycle of PC world - was much nicer, ~decade later.

Well, and the C64 did get at least a cosmetic upgrade halfway through (together with many hw revisions). Overall, we're sort of returning to the dynamics of the 80s, when the same CPU (among 6502, Z80, 68k) was good for a decade - because it largely wasn't the dominating factor in performance and/or was good enough, anyway.
Ywah, we're not setting specs in stone so much - but again, that's a good thing.

Developers, who were called programmers back then, knew what the specs were. I think that's a great advantage.

Apple doesn't have many computers in their line-up, but even the same model can differ in memory or processing power. Let alone over a period of 2-3 years. Different hardware, different operating systems.

The C64 didn't change and programmers learned to squeeze everything out of it. And if it ran fine at their end it would at yours.

I have a feeling a lot of coding issues these days are solved with more brute force than clever and efficient tinkering of code. Then again can you spend so much time on things in a world that moves so fast these days.